With a screenplay by Tony Kushner that’s based in part on the book “Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln” by Doris Kearns Goodwin, “Lincoln” is a revealing drama that focuses on the 16th President’s tumultuous final months in office. In a nation divided by war and the strong winds of change, Lincoln pursues a course of action designed to end the war, unite the country and abolish slavery. With the moral courage and fierce determination to succeed, his choices during this critical moment will change the fate of generations to come.

Also co-starring in the film is Gloria Reuben in the role of Elizabeth Keckley, the former slave who was the White House seamstress, confidante and dressmaker to Mary Lincoln. According the press notes, she was also an activist for women and children and freed slaves.

Best known for her role on the long-running TV series “ER,” the Canadian native stated that Keckley “was born into slavery and at the age of 39, ended up buying her own freedom for $1,200. She was highly gifted in the art of dressmaking, which she learned from her mother, and eventually ended up building up her own clientele of high society women and political wives before moving to D.C., where she befriended Mary Todd Lincoln and was hired as her personal seamstress.”

As she researched the role, Reuben discovered that “Elizabeth, too, had lost her own son in the Union Army and I think she and Mary were able to relate on that deep emotional level of mothers who have lost a child,” Reuben observes. “She became a kind of emotionally calming force in the Lincoln White House.”